Digital video camcorders are now available as commercial products. These digital camcorders produce digital video images which may be digitally manipulated and displayed. Personal computers are built for manipulating and storing digital data. Current standards for video camcorder data transmission require substantial amounts of hardware for image decompression when used in conjunction with a general purpose personal computer. The expense of this required hardware limits the number of applications where coupling a digital camcorder to a personal computer is economically feasible. Therefore there is a need in the art for a technique enabling software only decoding of encoded digital images is useful.